


in which gansey is the loneliest most connection-starved boy in the world, and ronan is full of light and love and warmth

by elliptical



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Mental Health Issues, Character Study, Codependency, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gansey Family Dynamics, Gansey is desperately lonely and unhappy, Gansey loves Ronan Lynch, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Lynch Family (Raven Cycle), Pre-Canon, Relationship Study, Ronan Lynch loves Gansey, Ronan doesn't know how kind he actually is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-24 04:59:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21093788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliptical/pseuds/elliptical
Summary: “I am going tostrangleyou.  JesusChrist.”“Come on.”  Ronan leans across the gearshift, now, knocks his elbow against Gansey’s arm.  “Don’t you ever just want to love beingalive,man?”“You,” Gansey says, slightly calmer, but still with the air of a witness damning a defendant, “are a terrible influence.”“God,” Ronan says happily, “I hope so.”-Or, a fic about how Ronan saved Gansey long before Gansey ever needed to save him.





	in which gansey is the loneliest most connection-starved boy in the world, and ronan is full of light and love and warmth

**Author's Note:**

> gansey and ronan both matter a lot to me.
> 
> i'm sure there are canon continuity details here and there i've made mistakes with, but this is meant to be basically canon compliant. an exploration of the feelings and experiences that drove gansey to wander, and then the feelings and experiences that drove him to cling so ferociously to home.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one comes back from the dead, one should not question the mechanics by which it happened. One should be grateful, accept the miracle, and move on. One should not develop an obsession with crawling insects and sobbing fear and an emptiness nothing fills. And if one does develop that kind of obsession, they certainly shouldn’t inflict their unpleasantness on innocent bystanders.

Gansey, ten years old and newly minted with existential terror and wonder so big they’re the same thing, learns very quickly to demarcate the lines of his search.

-

Gansey’s parents, loving and friendly and well-intentioned and upbeat and endlessly giving as they are, seem very supportive. At first.

Glendower is a good interest. Their boy likes history, and he’s found a piece of it that drives his fascination. That’s good. It’s good!

Richard Gansey II is a known eccentric with a journal that records the events of every April fourteenth since the dawn of time. Mrs. Gansey has one of the most famous collections of glass plates in the world. They’re a family that embraces quirks, oddities, strangeness!

So they throw their support behind their son. They encourage him to research and learn and form theories and devour the clues with hunger in his face. Their eyes light up with excitement when he finds new information, makes new connections, tells them about Glendower and his followers and his revolution. They pull fiscal and social strings, get Gansey in touch with experts, historians, avid researchers. They find him primary sources and let him have the world, because he’s their boy, and he deserves it.

Reenacting your death in the middle of the living room floor is not a good interest. Neither is fleeing a pleasant conversation with a peer - some son of some friend of the family - and locking yourself in your room for no reason. Neither is telling your sister that the very dead historical king you’re interested in is actually alive, buried and sleeping, an immortal god responsible for your medical miracle.

Just childish fancies. Rebelliously acting out. _You know how boys are._ Mrs. Gansey plucks anxiously at her pearl necklace as she double-checks her hair in the mirror. Then she smiles. It’s very convincing. If her boy learns these false-to-real smiles, he’ll forget the nightmares, and he won’t be crazy, and this unpleasantness will stop, and everyone will be happy and positive and lovely again.

He just needs to stop. That’s all. He just needs to stop.

-

So Gansey draws the lines.

His parents don’t raise their voices. They don’t speak in normal tones either. They playact diplomatic concern and encouragement and remind him that he is very lucky to have what he does, and it’s okay, buck up, you’ll solve that king puzzle!

There’s not a confrontation. There’s not a real conflict. That would require the Gansey family to say what they’re really thinking and feeling. Instead, they put on the face of who they need to be in the moment like they’re shrugging on a jacket, wait until the mask feels right. This is the most important lesson the parents pass on to their son.

There’s the silent, polite, heavily loaded double-talk and glances. Quick, uneasy eye contact between his parents when Gansey mentions getting stung. A tense increase in his mother’s walking pace when his breathing becomes audibly shallow. A smile that lasts just a little too long and a little too frozen when Gansey tells his father’s politician friend earnestly about magic and immortal sleep and miraculous favors. A hasty change of subject or too-cajoling voice when he slips from acceptably quirky interest to crazy.

Gansey catalogs each of the little winces and endless half-seconds of spooled-out tension and draws the lines. If he’s in pain or confused or empty or terrified or alone or desperately desperately wanting comfort - well, that’s not something to inflict on other people.

Why would you be unpleasant when you could make others feel good instead?

Gansey draws the lines. Everything real about Glendower is his alone. It is the loneliest island in the world. Everyone smiles through this kind of pain, though, and Gansey just has to keep it up until it sticks. Is anyone really happy?

Gansey aches like an open wound. His body is a prison, and his face of false expressions is the lock. He’s ten years old. He’s eleven, he’s twelve. Smiling hasn’t made it stop hurting yet, but no one wants to hear that.

Gansey has to get out or he’s going to die again. He can’t breathe. He needs Glendower. He needs purpose. He needs meaning. He needs magic. He needs anything, _anything_ other than this.

Gansey is twelve years old.

He tells his parents he’s going to find Glendower. They’re thrilled that their boy is so mature and independent. Anything you need, they tell him. You deserve the world.

-

Helen Gansey, who should be an awkward teenager but is already glamorous and successful and self-assured and ready to grab the world by the horns, sees the cracks in her baby brother.

He’s taking a private plane to destination Anywhere But Here, of course he is. She’s glad he’s going. He’s a kid, but he’s smart and basically has an adult’s soul, and she’s never forgotten the look in his eyes when he told her about dying. Her brother is a withered houseplant starved for water by forgetful custodians. The falseness strangles him. He’ll die again if he stays. She doesn’t think he’ll make it to eighteen.

She takes him aside as their parents back up, cheery goodbyes lofted away by the wind. Helen smiles where her parents can see, angles her head to make the shift invisible, and lets the corners of her mouth drop. Her eyes crinkle with worry.

Her brother doesn’t know how to respond. His smile freezes on his face, his own eyes confused, like he missed a dance step or forgot a line in a play. _God,_ Helen thinks. He’s _twelve._

“Call me, okay?” she says. Then pauses. “You don’t have to call them. But call me. Let me know you’re all right. Tell me if I can help you find that king.”

Gansey laughs a little, still confused, seeking out the double meaning. “I don’t think I’ll need help,” he says. He means, _I don’t think I’ll need_ you, _or this, or a reminder,_ and she hears it. She could accept the rejection, wave him off, let him wreck himself however he’s going to.

She raises her hand in farewell as he climbs the steps to the plane. “I’m getting my pilot’s license!” she calls. “Give me a shout when you want a birds’ eye perspective!”

It’s an offer, and a promise, and an understanding, and he hears it.

She complains endlessly when he takes her up on it, in the manner of an older sibling longsufferingly chauffering their shithead younger idiot around in their hard-won car. But the truth is that when he calls, she’s never been more relieved in her life.

-

So Gansey travels. And magic is real, and miracles, and wonders, and myths, and legends, and he doesn’t feel a thing.

He doesn’t get worse, technically. He just releases what was already inside him. There’s a kind of catharsis to it. He’s still alone, but he’s not surrounded by vultures. If he falls twitching to the ground with ghost-memory hornets crawling in his ears, no one’s waiting to swoop in upon his corpse. It feels good to collapse.

He does feel bad about Malory, though.

Nothing’s right. Nothing’s real. Nothing’s worth it. The magic doesn’t touch him, doesn’t wake him from his thousand-year sleep the way he desperately needs. He doesn’t sleep. He paces. He scribbles notes. He illustrates maps. He pens theories and doodles and splashes his mind onto paper so his thoughts will stop circling the drain.

It might be a survival mechanism. It’s also a happy accident. He falls in love with journaling, and researching, and the academic process, and the aesthetic appeal, and the tangible weight of knowledge-saturated pages. The journal began as a testament to his madness, but it holds the shape of his heart, and he loves it. He loves the mirror of his words, thoughts, quotes from long-dead poets and scholars. He loves the conversations with his past selves, all times preserved between two covers. He loves the irrelevant doodles and disorganized clutter and unnecessary lyrics tucked into cramped margins. He loves that this journal is every single piece of him that his parents prefer to erase. Through the journal, he discovers that he can be a little in love with his own crazy, and that love is an act of defiance.

It touches him. Strikes a chord, plucks a reverberating string against his ribs. None of the thousand miracles and impossibilities he’s witnessed has ever made music of his bones.

There’s an unrealized epiphany waiting in the shadows, something about what he is or what he’s meant to be. He rubs his thumb over his bottom lip, traces fingertips along the roughened edges of a thick cardstock sheet. When he exhales, all the breath leaves his lungs for the first time in a long time.

_Okay,_ he thinks. _Slow down. Breathe. It’s not the finding. It’s the seeking._

That feels right, finally.

-

He’s fifteen, an intrepid explorer, a king in his castle, an immortal youth, a legacy destined for greatness. He’s fifteen, strange and distant from his family, neurotic and self-obsessed, empty and aching and wanting _home, home, home_ when home doesn’t exist.

Henrietta isn’t supposed to be the answer. He doesn’t expect that. But he’s fifteen, which means that endless wandering now has consequences, because windblown romantic souls can’t get consistent 4.0 GPAs and a fast track to Harvard. His parents tell him to settle. Henrietta is a homing beacon of Glendower-related clues and magical potential. There’s enough saturated purpose that Gansey thinks he can occupy himself for a few months before itching out of his skin.

Convincing his parents to let him attend Aglionby is a nothing-doing, a question whose answer has been written since Gansey emerged from the womb. His dad is thrilled. It’s the best prep school in Virginia, after all, and his son deserves the best. _Oh, you’ll have such a great time, Dick. Did I tell you about the time we…_

Aglionby isn’t Gansey’s real life, and neither is that future. He doesn’t know what he wants, exactly, but it’s not the same thing his parents want for him.

And then there’s Henrietta. And then, night to day, flip of a switch, he knows _exactly_ what he wants.

-

So Henrietta is something. Aglionby is nothing. It’s a cover story, like he’s playing the nerdiest secret agent in Hollywood. Gansey’s going to do the work and get the grades and be the king and make the connections and let his body trip along his predestined path while his actual soul unwinds.

Aglionby is nothing. Gansey’s good at people pleasing. He’s fantastic at discovering what others want from him or want him to be, and he’s fantastic at transforming into that role. All armor. The ache has been his alone for years, and it’ll stay that way. He’s drawn his lines. Academic interest in magic and history is charming, engaging, as long as he doesn’t let them see the animal in his eyes. The search isn’t a secret. He is.

He’s not going to form peer relationships. He never has. Whatever adolescents are supposed to be, that’s for other teens. Stupid fights, crying, puberty, drama, friendship, loyalty, support. It’s for kids who aren’t too pretentious or too empty or too full or too busy marking time. Something inside him is the wrong shape, or maybe the world is just shaped wrong around him.

Gansey will take pleasure in his independence, though, and he will find ways to scratch his restless itching. The search is his life purpose. But it’s possible that human beings aren’t meant to be one singleminded desire. He needs to pad the bare bones of his concrete heart with lusher detail.

So there are things besides Glendower. Mainly, there’s the Camaro, which he buys because he wants it, or loves it, or he’s having a second life crisis, or he’s having an early midlife crisis. It doesn’t fit the public image of Richard Gansey III, but the real Gansey isn’t him. The Camaro feels closer to him, inside, than the mask ever has. It’s the shittiest car in the world, the loudest color and the loudest engine, constantly limping and wheezing and chugging along despite its faults, and he loves it. The Camaro makes him _happy,_ which - he didn’t really believe that was something he could be. For as long as he can remember, there’s only been the pain and brief snatches of peace.

Happy is for people who haven’t died, he thinks. His teen years will pass him by, and he’ll remain the same. Immutable, unchanging, a corpse pretending at growth. That’s all right. That’s all there is.

And then,

there’s Ronan Lynch.

-

His second day at Aglionby, Gansey finishes an enthusiastic afterschool discussion about Welsh sovereignity with the World History teacher. The conversation leaves him glowing and purposeful and thrilled to be in his element. He loves getting to talk about his passions. Also, despite his zero attachment to Aglionby, he’s hardwired to be a teacher’s pet.

He treads across the cracked asphalt of the student lot. His head is mired in the clouds and his eyes are focused on the weeds, so he’s nearly reached the driver’s side door of the Pig when he realizes someone’s on top of it.

The someone is a fellow student, clearly, given the uniform. Gansey can’t see much beyond a lanky impression of legs dangled over windshield, arms folded behind head, back carelessly arched. Someone with both their head and their eyes in the clouds, sun-warmed metal below and late spring pleasure above.

Gansey is nonplussed. For a moment, his eyes scan the lot like perhaps two students possess a roughed-up and furiously orange 1973 Camaro. He immediately realizes this is ridiculous. Not only are the odds slim-to-none, but he also remembers where he parked. He’s just not sure what to do with the fact of the stranger. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen such brazen disregard for other people’s property.

“Hey,” Gansey says. He lacks a social script for this specific circumstance, so his voice comes out uncertain. It lacks the manipulative intention and power he’s used to wielding, lands like a peer-to-peer greeting.

The kid sits up. He’s grinning, a little sly, a lot remorseless. Gansey has spent the past two days analyzing the student body, feeling out the energy of different individuals and cliques. Not so much seeking friendships as marking people to avoid at all costs. He studies the kid’s face and tries to decide whether _this_ is one of _those._ But - no, he doesn’t think so. If he had to define the expression aloud, he’d say it skews closer to “mischief” than “malice.”

“Hey,” the kid says. His eyes are the same pale blue as the spring sky, and his hair curls down to his chin in a style that must skirt the edge of administration approval. He looks like he was born sitting atop the Pig, or possibly like the Pig’s spirit manifested in human form specifically to laugh at Gansey.

“Not to devalue the merits of sunning oneself on a warm car,” Gansey starts, because this does in fact seem like a universal desire full of underappreciated merits, “but the Pig is held together with Scotch tape, Elmer’s glue, and prayer. I am experiencing an uncanny vision in which the roof crumples like a tin can, you fall through, and some medievally unpleasant impalement occurs.”

The kid considers this in the ponderous manner of a judge analyzing a previously-unconsidered legal argument. And then he lays back down. His head is turned toward Gansey this time, arm dangling over the side of the car. “Unfortunately,” he says, and he’s laughing, an unselfconscious flash of white teeth, “I live here now.”

Gansey searches his heart for irritation, worry, anger. Instead he finds a warmth like stretched taffy. The emotion has zero reasoning or rationality. When he probes deeper, he discovers the roots are that the kid is supposed to be there, like they’ve done this before, or they’ll do it again, or Gansey’s always existed in this moment. Like they already know each other, like their souls have always been entwined and Gansey just forgot.

Gansey senses an existential crisis on the horizon if he probes this too deeply, so he sets it into the drawer labeled “Things Not to Psychoanalyze.”

“Do not get intestinal matter on my gearshift,” Gansey replies, stern, like he’s ordering an overenthusiastic puppy not to pee on the carpet even though he knows it’s going to pee on the carpet.

The kid beams. He’s all unguarded relaxation and happiness, thrilled to lay on this sunwarmed car and banter with a new friend. Gansey’s startled, briefly, by the idea that maybe he feels the pull too. But then Gansey reminds himself that normal teens take pleasure in friendly conversation with strangers and acquaintances all the time.

“You’re telling me I craft you a fucking sunroof with my flesh and blood,” the kid says, “and all you care about is the _intestinal matter?”_

Gansey laughs. He doesn’t expect to. He’s not used to his body’s laughter being reflexive instead of forced. It makes him a little dizzy. Something’s different in the world, suddenly, but he’s not sure what.

“You want to go for a ride?”

-

So that’s Ronan Lynch.

He’s the first - though far from the last - of Gansey’s missing pieces.

Part of Gansey already loves him before he’s even started the car. Part of Gansey has loved Ronan since before he knew Ronan existed. Gansey does not think this consciously, but the fact presents itself as languageless emotion. His heart understands some truths that his head doesn’t.

“You’re new in town, right?” Ronan asks. “Where do you and your folks live?”

He’s got the window rolled down and his arm hanging in the wind. Gansey’s not sure where they’re going, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Ronan’s shoulder is a vibrating blur where it rests against the Pig’s rattling frame.

Gansey explains the school situation, offers the academic one-line summary of the Glendower search, mentions his parents encourage independence.

“But you don’t live on campus.”

Gansey smiles, shakes his head.

Ronan arches an eyebrow, but all he says is, “Turn here.”

Gansey does without question. They’ve been meandering out of the most populated part of Henrietta, driving into the wild forests that enclose the town. This particular road is a black-tar dream edged by arching green trees and vivid brown bark. It stretches impossibly far because it’s set on a downgrade, gentle curves grasping for the horizon. The fresh-painted double yellow splits the two single lanes like warning stripes.

“Where are we going?” Gansey yells. Between the roar of the engine and the slowly increasing scream of wind against the window, it’s the only way to be heard.

“Down!”

Gansey’s heartbeat is fast enough to rush in his ears. The situation is, technically, not dangerous. There is, technically, no reason to be thrilled. Clinically assessed, they’re just two teenagers in an old car traversing a winding road on a spring afternoon. Pared down to the external essentials, they might as well be a vintage postcard romanticizing nonexistent “good old days.”

In practice, though, the Pig’s increasing rattling is like the snarl of some prehistoric beast, and the wind beats the sides of the car like a maelstrom, and Gansey is not pressing hard enough on the brake to make the curves gentle. Every breath he takes sticks in his lungs, sharp, electric, alive. Even as he’s feeling the spread of oxygen-rich blood through his limbs, and his heart and mind working together to pump joy, and his skin singing with the knife-blast whip-crack of air entering the cabin, he also feels his memory encoding the moment. He knows that he will have this snatched gasp of freedom to relive every time bleak gray emptiness descends on his mind.

Gansey lifts his foot fully from the brake.

He can hit the pedal again in a fraction of a second; the danger has not increased. But the downward nosedive of the Pig suddenly feels a lot more wild and uncontrolled. The hill isn’t even that steep, but Gansey’s skydiving.

His knuckles are white around the steering wheel. He’s been focused on the unspooling thread of road and the technicolor live wire of his heart, not paying attention to Ronan. But when he glances over, Ronan’s watching him with a smile that’s so much more dangerous and animate than his earlier ones that Gansey’s breath stops. When Gansey removes one fisted hand from the wheel and touches his mouth, he discovers his own smile is a perfect mirror of Ronan’s.

His face has never worn this expression before.

There’s a challenge in Ronan’s eyes. On a logical level, Gansey is aware that he’s making poor decisions. On a real level, he has no interest in changing that.

He steps on the gas.

Ronan lets out a wild whoop and then, like a god comfortable in the sanctity of his domain, grabs the roof of the Pig and levies himself partway out. He’s screaming into the wind for no apparent reason beyond the pure unholy joy of it. If his hands slip, he’s going to tip backward. Best case scenario, turn into a roadburn-skidded scraped-to-bone pile of emergency room bait.

Gansey places his foot on the brake but presses slow, since slamming seems more liable to hurl Ronan clear of the car. He’s not sure Ronan will be able to hear him, but he roars anyway, at the top of his lungs: _”ARE YOU INSANE?”_

Ronan’s scream of laughter is indistinguishable from the scream of the wind and the engine. Gansey thinks he makes out a, _”HELL FUCKING YES!”_

The coasting down the hill and subsequent slowing of the Pig takes ten, maybe fifteen more seconds. Gansey feels every one of them in his throat. It’s not even _bad,_ which he knows is bad by itself. Instead, it’s something so wild and terrifying and infuriating and manic and euphoric that his heart feels like it’ll explode. He comes to a gentle stop at level ground and pulls onto the shoulder, hitting the parking brake with more violence than is necessary.

Ronan pulls himself back through the open window and thumps down on the passenger seat like he was born to sit there, just like he looked born to lay on the roof. There are probably bugs in his teeth.

Gansey still doesn’t feel bad. He thinks he’s mad, actually, but the anger is so good it becomes another real-time coded memory to savor when he’s exhausted. “You,” he says, pointing at Ronan like a witness for the prosecution, “are the _devil.”_

Finished with his adrenaline trip, Ronan leans forward and smacks an open palm on the dashboard and laughs again. It’s more panting than laughing, actually, as he gasps back his stolen breath. “Jesus,” he says, not sounding the least bit sorry. “Jesus, you look like you’re on fire.”

“I am going to _strangle_ you. Jesus _Christ.”_

“Come on.” Ronan leans across the gearshift, now, knocks his elbow against Gansey’s arm. “Don’t you ever just want to love being _alive,_ man?”

“You,” Gansey says, slightly calmer, but still with the air of a witness damning a defendant, “are a terrible influence.”

“God,” Ronan says happily, “I hope so.”

-

Ronan _should_ be a bad influence. He’s a speed demon, a sarcastic dick, an impulsive son of a bitch, and doesn’t seem to believe in mortality. He’s certainly never allowed to drive the Camaro. But his laughter and his happiness and his energy are infectious, and he’s loving in an open and physical way that Gansey’s never experienced. Ronan’s love is an arm slung around Gansey’s shoulders, a leg hooked around his, a head rested on Gansey’s stomach while he’s trying to study splayed-out on the campus green. It’s casual shoving and laughter and wrestling and knuckles scrubbed against Gansey’s scalp. It’s an uncomplicated and bright and wild thing.

Gansey loves it so much.

Ronan doesn’t seem like a real person, sometimes, to Gansey. But that’s not accurate. The truth is that Gansey looks at the vibrant expressions on Ronan’s face and the light in his eyes and the way his hands move when he talks and the transformation of his feelings into kinetic motion, and Gansey thinks that Ronan is the only real person he’s ever met. To be around Ronan is to discover an extension of the visible light spectrum. Gansey could not imagine these colors before, but now he can’t imagine living without them. The world that birthed him is so washed-out by comparison.

Ronan brings Gansey to his home. Only when Gansey walks through the barns that house hay and feed and mountains of sawdust and lowing cattle does he realize he knows exactly what Ronan smells like, because the air here carries the same perfume. Gansey opens his mouth and breathes it in, leans his forehead against a doorframe, swallows the press of unexplainable tears in his throat. It’s not that the place feels like home to him, exactly. It’s more... home-adjacent, or something that could have been home, or that he wishes had been home.

Ronan, ahead of him, notices Gansey’s absence and doubles back. He doesn’t ask if Gansey is okay, which is a blessing, because Gansey’s voice would say no before Gansey himself can consider whether he wants to be honest. But Ronan does lay a hand on his shoulder, arm around the back of his neck. Gansey has the feeling he _knows._ “Hey,” Ronan starts, and Gansey braces for the query, “want to see a robin’s nest?”

A grateful exhale. Gansey nods. Yes. Yes, so much.

-

Ronan’s mother is the first Lynch parent Gansey meets, because Ronan’s father is perpetually traveling. Gansey’s familiar with both of Ronan’s brothers, though he’s still feeling out the shape of them. He knows that Matthew’s presence lends Ronan the bouncing energy of an eternally playful puppy, because nothing reminds Ronan how much he loves life like Matthew does. He knows that Declan is a strange frost unsuited to this summer country, that his friendly demeanor covers something complicated, that he wears a mask like Gansey’s own, and Gansey has no idea what’s beneath.

But Ronan’s mother is -

She’s somehow exactly what Gansey expects and not at all what Gansey expects. It’s not that he expected something different of Ronan, he realizes. It’s just that he’s still unused to the extra colors in Ronan’s world. Ronan’s mother doesn’t have any of the sleek utilitarianism or weaponized self-possession of the professional women in Gansey’s life. Nor does she have the haggard bags and harried expression Gansey’s seen on many women in his own mother’s social circle.

Ronan brings Gansey into the farmhouse kitchen. It’s filled with oddities and knickknacks and clutter, and some objects draw Gansey’s eye, whisper that he should look closer. But the itch comes from too many places at once. Gansey can’t focus on one thread. It’s just because of the explosion of so much unusual lifestyle in one space, he thinks, and sets the strangeness aside.

Aurora Lynch sits at the long kitchen table, which is covered in bundles and stacks and heaps of different blossoms. Gansey’s traveled the world and hiked through rainforests and browsed his fair share of gardens, but even he can’t name half the blooms. The shed petals and leaves on the floor are a trail like glitter from a faery’s wings. Gansey thinks suddenly, absurdly, that there’s something fey-like in Ronan, too, and that if this place is the other world, then he understands why humans are always spiriting themselves away.

But when Aurora Lynch looks up and smiles, she’s human again, and the flowers and the leaves are just organic clippings, nothing mystical about them. Gansey watches her nimble hands twist together a complicated braid of stems, weaving together explosions of yellow and red and pink and blue and orange. Every so often, she’ll strip a thorn from a rose before it pricks her, an easy instinct born of long practice. It’s like watching a master weave or paint after honing their craft for twenty years. Gansey’s transfixed.

“Hello!” she says. Her smile is Ronan’s smile. The gentle crinkles at the corners of her eyes are Ronan’s, too. In terms of physical features, Ronan doesn’t much take after her, but Gansey can instantly see how she’s created half of him.

Gansey realizes, suddenly, that he doesn’t know whether to call her ma’am or Mrs. Lynch. He also doesn’t know how to introduce himself. He’s never had to decide which name to give a friend’s parents before.

Ronan saves him the trouble. “Mom, this is Gansey,” he says. “Gansey, this is Mom.”

“You can call me Aurora,” she offers, setting her flower braid on the table so she can stand. She extends her hand to Gansey, and for a second he panics. His upbringing tells him to shake it, but her gracefulness tells him to kiss it like he’s paying respects to a queen. In the end, he reaches out himself, uncertain, and she takes his hand and squeezes his fingers with all the reassurance in the world.

“Gansey’s parents live out of town. He’s at Aglionby with me,” Ronan says. The casualness of it would pass muster with anyone else. But Gansey, who’s fluent in nothing but double meanings, catches an undercurrent below the words. Ronan has either intuited something about him or thinks he’s intuited something about him, and Gansey’s not sure how he feels about it. “So I figured he could chill.”

“Of course.” Aurora lifts a small dish towel from the kitchen counter to wipe away the moisture clinging to her hands. “Ronan tells me you’re looking for a king?”

Gansey is so startled by this that it takes a full two seconds to school his expression back into pleasant neutrality. He’s not sure whether he’s more surprised that Ronan has substantive enough conversations with his mother to discuss his friends, or that Ronan has discussed _him._ About Glendower. Actually, Gansey thinks he might just be surprised to know that Ronan’s _listened._

“I am,” he says. He tries to catch Ronan’s eye, scream a silent conversation, garner information about whether this is the type of parent to trust. But Ronan’s gathering up the shaken-loose flower petals scattered across the table, head tilted like he’s listening without interrupting. Gansey sees no tension in his shoulders or jaw. The idea that Aurora might find Gansey too strange or offputting to tolerate doesn’t appear to have occurred to him.

Honestly, that’s more telling than a full minute of Morse code blinks and subtle hand gestures. “I’m also,” Gansey adds, “looking for magic.”

Aurora’s face brightens. Gansey checks for signs of playacted interest or boredom, but if she’s pretending, then she’s an incredible actress. “Oh, I _love_ magic,” she says. “Tell me all about it.”

-

Gansey meets Niall Lynch when he settles for a week or two between flights of fancy. Usually, when Gansey hears stories of people prior to meeting them in person, he’s underwhelmed by the actual reality. He’s managed his expectations through all of Ronan’s enthusiastic stories of adventure and conquest and a childhood filled with wonders. Ronan sees his father through rose-colored glasses. Gansey expects someone boisterous, loud, energetic, but ultimately forgettable. Just one more charismatic and charming father in a ticker-tape parade of success stories. Gansey’s familiar with the type.

But Niall Lynch is everything Ronan describes and then some. The way he walks, emotes, uses his hands. The way he speaks, each word rolling into the next like he’s weaving rope to snare or save the listener. The way he loves, and the way he lies. Gansey’s grown up around enough peacocks to realize that part of Niall’s larger-than-life character is a performance. But it’s a very, very good one.

Gansey experiences Niall through a funhouse mirror. He’s not seeing Niall at all; he’s looking at Ronan in twenty years, or a present-day Ronan who’s older, or a Ronan turned sideways and changed. This bothers him, because Ronan doesn’t tend to perform anything, so Gansey doesn’t understand why they should seem so similar. The physical resemblance is uncanny, sure, but Gansey would like to believe he’s not so easily fooled by appearances.

It’s that Niall and Ronan are the same, he thinks, in their presence in the world. Ronan is honest and unconcerned with pretense, and so Gansey can connect to him like he’s never connected to anyone. But honesty isn’t the only piece of Ronan that Gansey admires. Ronan and Niall both have this way of existing inside a single moment, finding unique joy, and reflecting that joy back into the universe. It’s a more authentic and dynamic means of living than Gansey had previously considered possible. The more time Gansey spends around Ronan’s brand of uncomplicated happiness, the more he thinks that maybe real happiness is meant to start from the inside out instead of outside-in.

That feels truer, realer, than any of the fake smiles his mother has taught him.

Ronan’s family feels truer, realer, than any other piece of Gansey’s life.

Gansey wants to believe that there are more places and people like this in the world. That Gansey will someday share a connection with more individuals who make him feel known and realign his world with new colors. That Gansey will someday walk over a threshold and shrug off his coat and toe off his shoes in a home that envelops him the way the Barns envelops Ronan. Ronan moves through the world with an unquestioning self-possession, because Ronan knows he’ll always return to this kingdom. Here, Ronan is a piece of a matched set, a seamless integration to the decor, a creature built and loved and belonging to this landscape.

There are not words to describe the raw ache of Gansey’s want.

-

Ronan offers his entire self to Gansey without hesitation. His home, his family, his childhood, his love, his trust, his friendship. Gansey doesn’t know how to repay him. The scope of Ronan’s kindness is impossible to measure, made more impactful because Ronan doesn’t realize he’s being kind. At least, Gansey doesn’t think he does. To Ronan, the world is a place where everyone is entitled to loving families and accepting homes and joyful purposes. And Ronan’s family is as much a part of him as Gansey’s family is alienated from him. It’s never occurred to Ronan not to share them.

Gansey doesn’t think he’s ever given a single thing to Ronan. Time and companionship and adventure, sure, but he doesn’t think - he’s never going to be to Ronan what Ronan is to him. And that’s fine, he reminds himself quickly, that’s good, because he should never have to _save_ Ronan, because wishing for that is wishing for Ronan to get hurt, and Gansey would rather die again than let that happen.

(He’ll remember the fleeting thought, anyway, in a few months. He’ll lie awake and stare at the ceiling and wonder if maybe it was an invocation. He doesn’t know what magic is real.)

Ronan has given Gansey his home. Ronan has offered a quiet, protective presence when Gansey’s sadness threatens to swallow him. Ronan has listened to talk of Glendower and followed Gansey on the search and paged through his journal with nonjudgmental curiosity. Ronan has accepted, wholly and without reserve, that magic is real, and that legends are based in truth, and that somewhere lies a sleeping king who can grant impossible wishes. In each of these gifts, Ronan’s given love where Gansey’s braced himself for mockery. It’s strange to think that Ronan - who can, in his worst moods, be the most derisive and vicious person Gansey’s ever met - is the first person in Gansey’s life who’s offered _belief._

The relief is a double-edged sword. With every new and unquestioning acceptance, Gansey becomes more afraid of the inevitable shoe drop. Gansey is so desperate to be known. The ache of being heard and seen and _believed_ makes the desperation impossible to ignore. Before Ronan, Gansey could manage the solitude. But now, if he has to return to being alone and empty and wanting and crazy and begging for validation, he -

He doesn’t know what he’ll do. He thinks it’s possible that he will simply lie down and never get up again.

The truth is, Gansey is a starving creature, and he is also terrified he might once again become the wraith he’s outrunning.

It feels like Gansey has known Ronan forever, or will know him forever, or like that’s the same thing. In measured seconds, it’s only been a few weeks, months. A nothing-thing. A sliver, a twitch of a second hand. Gansey’s heart believes it will know Ronan forever, but his head knows this is not a logistical guarantee. He’s also aware that he’s romanticizing their friendship because it’s the only real connection he’s ever made. His dependence on Ronan is something he tries to hide, because it’s not fair to ask Ronan to be everything. But Gansey also doesn’t know how to _stop_ being dependent on Ronan.

The longer Gansey guards his secrets, the harder his howling ghosts scratch at his insides. They want to be freed. Two futures are possible, here. In one, Ronan accepts Gansey with continued unquestioning loyalty. In the other, Ronan laughs or recoils because _Jesus, dude, we aren’t friends like that, we were just hanging out, did you think--?_

By delaying the split of this path, Gansey’s not carving a third option. He’s just stringing himself thin with useless terror.

So it’s time.

-

Ronan slides into the passenger seat of the Camaro after school, loosens his tie with the drama of someone being strangled. He’s never stopped looking like he belongs there. Like he’s always been and will be a thousand more times. Left to chew his nerves to pieces, Gansey’s worn through his fear and broken through to the sadness. The desolation finds him less often these days, and very rarely in Ronan’s presence, so he’s out of practice in hiding it. Or Ronan just knows him too well.

Ronan uses one of his sharp, quick, assessing looks to gather more information than Gansey intends to project.

“So,” he says, kicking his feet up on the dash, “we could go to the drag strip, or Nino’s, or the woods, or we can hang in my room and watch a movie, or get the fuck out of town for a few hours. Those are my ideas. Unless you’ve got a better offer.”

What he’s really saying is that he knows Gansey needs a distraction or an escape, and he’ll let Gansey decide what form it takes, and he’ll come along for the ride.

For a moment, Gansey considers choosing one of Ronan’s preset options. He knows he has to get the ache out of him before it devours him, but his heart is fragile and afraid. His head knows that worrying causes unnecessary suffering. Both his head and heart know that there’s no reason to think that showing Ronan his need will mean the end of them. But he still doesn’t seem able to stop stretching ahead to a timeline where he drives home alone each day and the ghost or the memory or the impression of Ronan mocks him from the empty seat.

He can’t lose this.

It’s time.

“Let’s go to my place,” he says.

This immediately gets Ronan’s attention. Gansey didn’t intend to make a secret of Monmouth, but that’s how things have shaken out. Part of him wishes he’d brought Ronan to the warehouse weeks ago. The first day they’d met, maybe. Taken Ronan on a tour through the rusted husks of machines and debris and dust before any of Gansey was evident inside. Keeping Monmouth secret makes it a mystery. Ronan will extrapolate answers to unasked questions, loaded meaning, pretentious metaphor.

Monmouth is a truth of him like Glendower is a truth of him. And like Glendower, Gansey can turn Monmouth into a toothless conversational piece digestible by any stranger. He could have given Ronan the spiel about investment properties and the accruement of real estate value and independent living and the charm of restoring an old building. It would have been so easy to duck into the refuge of pleasantly interesting strangeness, palatable for party guests and never troublesome.

But that’s exactly why he didn’t. The cover story is a lie, and Gansey would not have been able to tell Ronan the truth, not before Ronan had given Gansey his own truth. Gansey can slap a ragged plaster patch over the yawning chasm in his chest, but he chooses not to for Ronan. He wants one thing in his life to be real.

Ronan says, “Fuck yeah, let’s go to your place. I gotta pee on it.”

“Jesus, Lynch,” Gansey says, but the response relieves him enough to let the engine cough to life. The Camaro rolls out of the lot. Ronan’s giving him a reprieve. “Did you know cats and dogs pee more excessively on things if they’re territorially insecure?”

“Of course I’m territorially insecure. I haven’t peed on your place yet.”

Gansey laughs. Ronan smiles the smallest bit, his eyes darting to Gansey before he angles his head and turns his attention outside the window. That’s another reprieve, that smile. Or a promise.

-

So the Camaro limps valiantly to its resting place in the parking lot of Monmouth Manufacturing. Gansey has not done a thing for the curb appeal. The surrounding lawn is a weedy jungle of yellow, tick-infested grasses. The building itself has the derelict air that reeks of disease and wanton code violations. The kind of place that’s left to rot because demolishing it would cost more. Monmouth is not pretty, or externally interesting, or even noticeable.

Gansey doesn’t want it to be, though.

Ronan opens the door, grips the car roof and pulls himself out. He leans against the Pig’s frame and surveys the site as calm and cool as can be. Gansey doesn’t know what to make of that. The little furrow in Ronan’s brow means he’s thinking, or doing some quick calculations.

Then Ronan peels himself away from the Camaro, hip checks the door closed. “Is this a cry for help. Are you homeless.”

“No,” Gansey says impatiently. He’s not offended by reactions to the exterior, anyway; it’s not important. “I own the building.”

Ronan makes a grand, sweeping gesture at the everything about Monmouth. “Is it one of those ‘inherited in a vaguely-worded will from a mysterious benefactor you’d never heard of’ deals? Because I’m pretty sure that never _actually_ happens.”

Gansey’s mouth twitches. He tries to be stern. “No. I drove past it, found out who owned the land, and paid cash.”

“So you moved to town, paid cash for a giant whatever-the-fuck-this-is that no one will ever look at, refused to tell anyone where you live, and now you’ve dragged me here under mysterious circumstances.” Ronan sighs like a schoolteacher who expected but is still disappointed by the rule-breaking shenanigans of a troublesome pupil. “I bet there’s no cell reception, either. It’s always the quiet ones.”

Gansey exits the car, closes the door, and starts toward Monmouth’s entrance. “Have I ever told you that your mind is a very dark place?”

“Oh, fuck you. I just want it on the record that buying this place is _begging_ to get your ass haunted.”

“Duly noted.”

Ronan catches up to Gansey anyway, despite his apparent deep-seated belief that Gansey is a serial killer. Gansey’s heart is suddenly tripping double-time. He hasn’t buried any bodies, and the only skeleton in his closet is his own, but he’s still anxious. The entire journey through the door and up the stairs should be long enough to calm his blood and breath. And yet, his ears are thrumming when he reaches the top of the landing.

He only realizes he’s paused when Ronan’s footsteps stop behind him. Gansey forces himself to move, to tread a path inside and shrug off his backpack and stretch and pretend he’s not wound tight as a bowstring.

Monmouth isn’t yet what it will be - what he wants it to be. Not even close. Gansey knows the shape and tender ache of how the space will look when he’s finished with it. An external manifestation of his soul. Not just a home base for the search, but a reflection of everything he’s gained along the way. The research and the maps to anywhere and the love of expanding theories and solving mysteries and dissecting clues and learning and existing in suspended moments where all times are the same, all paths are possible. He wants Monmouth to house and protect the fragile things he’s collected over the years, and his hundreds of books, and his thoughts, and his yearning. He wants to lay in a patch of grid-patterned sunlight thrown carelessly from the glass windows onto the floor, feel the world open around him, reach for whatever magic wants to be found.

Monmouth is not that, yet. Right now, it’s filled with mysterious piles of cluttered junk and obsolete machinery. Gansey has no idea what Monmouth manufactured or what the machinery even did. When he first walked inside, the desolate clutter transformed into a graveyard of irregular tombstones. Gansey surveyed it and thought, _All right. I can build what I want around the debris. I’ll make it work._

His boxes of found things are stacked against one of the windows, but the treasures are hidden from view. All carefully labeled, all sorted, all with memories attached. His desk sits against another window, his bed carelessly dragged into the middle of the floor.

He’s created an academic shrine to the Glendower search on one of the walls. Well, he calls it academic when he needs a positive adjective. In truth, it’s more of a chaotic and tangled web comprised of empty, desperate years. It’s Gansey’s starvation painted into corkboard connections and scribbled handwriting and twine. It’s what he needs Ronan to see, but looking at the wall now, Gansey can’t escape a vague sense of embarrassment. All this drama, all this pretending. When his pain is given shape, it’s nothing but an aesthetic cliche. A black hole of derisive unrelatability. The stripped-bare earnestness of it curdles shame in his stomach. He shouldn’t show people this without a preemptive warning. It’s indecent.

“Shit, man,” Ronan says.

Gansey turns toward him, expecting the worst. But Ronan’s attention isn’t on any of the ugly pieces. Instead, Ronan’s gaze is transfixed on the wall of windows. Though Monmouth isn’t yet what it’s going to be, the windows are close. A few broken panes allow rain inside, and Gansey hasn’t yet had them repaired. But he’s cleaned the glass as meticulously as possible, removing dust and dirt and streaks and spots and stains. He’s given every whole pane the full measure of his care and devotion because he loves the light.

It’s a good time for this. The early summer days are long, so the sun is high and late afternoon angled. The rays stretch inside like a ripple of fabric. Each illuminates a wedge of dancing dust motes, the air golden and ethereal. The floor bathes in sunlight. Shadows stretch long on the sides of abandoned equipment where the light doesn’t reach.

Ronan’s face is wondering, tilted up, surprised and enamored by this mundane magic. For a second, he looks the same way Gansey often feels. Like he’s been pulled out of time, experiencing the same moment over and over, every second coexisting in its own eternity.

Then Ronan shakes his head like he’s dissipating a spell. Shoves his hands in his pockets. “It suits you,” he mutters. If Gansey didn’t know him, he’d think the tone was a sarcastic mockery. But Ronan never insults people quietly. When he mumbles, it’s because he’s embarrassed and sincere.

_It suits you._ Gansey swallows, closes his eyes. His heart feels like spun glass. There’s no way to pull the mask over this face, but he doesn’t need the mask.

Ronan loves light, too.

Ronan recovers himself. “All this shit in here, though, Jesus,” he says. He turns in a circle like he’s snapshotting a mental panorama, then points at a waist-high rusted heap that presumably once served a purpose. “I feel like I need a tetanus shot just _looking_ at that. What even is it?”

“I suppose it might be a modern art installation,” Gansey says ponderingly. “This might have been a modern art museum, in fact. There’s really no telling.”

“Fuck modern art. You want help cleaning up around here?”

Gansey hesitates, unsure whether he should take offense.

Ronan rolls his eyes. “Not _your_ shit. Do whatever the fuck you want with your shit. I mean the junk. Unless this is how you want it for your _feng shui_ or what-fucking-ever.”

Gansey presses his thumb to his bottom lip. “It _is_ a bit cluttered.”

“Yeah, I’ll fucking say. No goddamn space to think.”

Ronan’s not wrong. All things considered, they are standing inside the open world map of Gansey’s mind. Gansey kind of likes working around the debris. His own head also enjoys generating pointless blockages and dangers. It seems like an apt extension of the metaphor.

Ronan helping him clear the space, though. Gansey likes that metaphor better by far.

“I wouldn’t want you to feel obligated,” Gansey says, because he has to, just in case.

Ronan laughs. _”Obligated?_ Dragging around a bunch of scrap metal and setting shit on fire is the fucking _dream,_ dude. That’s what my Sunday school drawings of heaven looked like. It’s gonna be fucking awesome. I can’t believe you think I’d ever let you do something so insanely fun without inviting me.”

Something inside Gansey loosens. With it comes a wave of physical relief that weakens his muscles. He casually sinks to the floor. Unzips his backpack and removes the English reading, like getting dust all over his nice pants was an intentional decision. Ronan, who has no particular interest in doing homework he can copy off someone else, begins a languid exploration of the space. His slow prowl doesn’t heighten Gansey’s anxiety the way it might have five minutes ago. Gansey is just warm, and happy, and known.

Gansey is jotting down his last bullet point for the end-of-chapter analysis questions when Ronan, strangely guarded before the Wall of Yearning, asks, “How’d you choose Glendower?”

“I don’t take your meaning,” Gansey says. He feels bad a second later, because that’s a blatant lie. He knows what Ronan is asking. It’s a question he already planned to answer today, but he needs time to remember the right words.

“It’s just, the way I see it,” Ronan says, speaking slow, each word a contemplative measure unto itself, “the magic had to come first, right? You’ve got all this shit about ley lines and energy and sleepers and how favoring works. You’re looking for a ley line to find Glendower. It wasn’t Glendower first, and then the magic. It was the other way around. So why him?”

It sounds like he’s gearing up for a fight. Gansey’s response is cool, composed. A little frosty. “You seem to have given this a lot of thought.”

“I _know_ secrets, Gansey.” Gansey balks before taking Ronan’s actual meaning - that he knows the _concept_ of secrets, not the specific shape of Gansey’s. “Whatever yours is, it’s _eating you.”_

He’s certainly not wrong about that.

“Well.” Gansey blinks. “First, I died.”

-

In the end, all the scripting and rehearsal and practice Gansey’s done is useless. It’s unhelpful to use easy flippancy to pretend the story doesn’t affect him, and it’s equally unhelpful to inject an air of melodrama to render the tale thrilling and adventurous. Gansey thinks, before he starts, that he knows _how_ to tell the story. But once he’s inside the moment, he realizes that isn’t true. He’s been foolish again. This experience of his has been confessed to a handful of individuals over the years - Malory, the lightning boy, other miraculous and impossible humans, unimportant strangers whose reactions meant nothing.

And every time Gansey’s told the story, it’s come out differently. The tone and weight shifts. He doesn’t mean to do it. But he finds himself spinning the tale that the other person wants to hear instead of the one that matters.

Gansey’s never told the truth in his life.

In the end, Gansey just has the shape of the feelings inside him, and Ronan Lynch in front of him, and Ronan does not say a word, but the dangerous luminosity of his eyes tells Gansey that he wants the story that matters. So Gansey gives it to him.

Ronan becomes someone different during the telling, or maybe just betrays a new side of himself. His relaxed shoulders and loose hands curl into taut lines. His spine sharpens with intention. His expression turns cold, remote, angry. This Ronan, Gansey thinks, is a weapon coiled for discharge. Frightening, or frightened. Feral.

At the time, Gansey doesn’t know how to interpret the posture beyond the fact of Ronan’s obvious upset. He understands it later. This is the thing fear makes of Ronan. His unguarded heart rolls too close to the soul-blackening horror of potential loss, and his body freezes into stone. Something primal and vicious and protective chokes his easy happiness to silence.

This time, this first time, the angry creature dissolves when they move past the telling. Ronan has spent ten minutes imagining a world bereft of Gansey, and it’s the worst thing he’s ever contemplated, but Gansey’s here and fine and safe. It’s only a story. A too-frightening fairytale inside a book he can close. And if these ten minutes of suspended imagination suffocate Ronan with black, bloody viscera about what he has to lose, well, those fears are only stories too.

In a few months, when Ronan’s exploded shrapnel through everyone left who cares about him, and matched every easy happiness he used to share with an equally easy cruelty, and tried to escape the prison of his own skin, Gansey will be as unable to explain their relationship as he is to explain the _need_ of the Glendower search. The thing is that Gansey will never be able to see the pain Ronan causes as malice, even when he tries, even when he _wants_ to. Because part of Gansey is always here, in this moment, sitting on the dusty floor of Monmouth Manufacturing and watching Ronan burn from the inside out. Part of Gansey is always watching Ronan examine the spectacle of loss this first time, watching the acid swallow him.

So Ronan, after, is not an unforgivable monster. Gansey can’t even see him as a selfish, uncaring asshole, and that interpretation’s _fair._ When Gansey finds Ronan bloody-knuckled or drunk or scraped or standing eerie by the windows with empty hatred possessing what used to be his best friend, all he’ll ever see is Ronan’s horror. Gansey has died once, and the resulting trauma can snare him unexpectedly like a deep-ocean current begging to salt his lungs. Ronan’s current never allows him to surface. Every second bleeds into another second and another where the drowning continues. There is no waiting for the terror to pass. There’s not even waiting for the release of unconsciousness, not when the universe has decided Promethean immortality is more fitting. In a few months, when Gansey thinks too hard about it (palms pressed to eyes, breathing uneven, salt in throat, shaking apart on the floor of the kitchen-bathtub-laundry), he understands what makes Ronan want to die.

Gansey, in a few months, will be one of the only things in the world that Ronan has not lost. Leaving is a non-starter. The prospect is laughable. When Adam becomes part of his life, Gansey will never quite find the words to explain _why,_ but his ferocious intensity will be answer enough.

In this moment, on the dusty floor of Monmouth, Gansey tells Ronan the truth. The story itself is not his secret. The events, though they make him sound crazy, are not inherently vulnerable. The secret is the way Gansey’s voice breaks when he says, “So I have to find him, I have to find him, that’s all there is,” and the way tears burn his eyes when he says, “I need there to be a _reason.”_

And in the end, like he’d already told himself, there’s never been a foundation for the worry. Ronan has accepted far more unbelievable things with unshakable faith. Gansey has nothing to fear from Ronan; all his doubt comes from himself. In the end, Ronan sits beside Gansey in the dust and the dirt and the golden afternoon sunshine, and he wraps an arm tightly around Gansey’s shoulders, and he’s real and tangible and warm and scented with his home.

“So we’ll find him,” Ronan says, his own voice rough. “You need to find him? We’ll find him.”

Gansey wants to say it’s not that easy. He wants to say maybe he hallucinated. He wants to say that maybe his existence is meaningless, purposeless, futile. Faced with the absoluteness of Ronan’s belief, Gansey’s only just realizing how many hairline cracks run through his own certainty. He’s needed to be right for so long. There’s never been anything else.

But here, there’s Ronan.

Gansey leans his head against Ronan’s shoulder and closes his eyes. Something inside him settles. Home. The search has brought him here, to Henrietta and Aglionby and Monmouth and the Barns and Ronan and Ronan’s family. In five years collecting incredible wonders, these things are the most incredible Gansey’s experienced, and there’s nothing supernatural about them at all. The magic has nothing to do with impossibility.

But it is magic. It’s the first magic that has ever encompassed Gansey, explained Gansey, allowed him to glimpse a greater purpose.

Home.

“We’ll find him,” Gansey murmurs, and lets Ronan anchor him down.


End file.
